Blame Television For Everything
That's Wrong In Your World

MYM Tip #84
 

Feeling a little out of sorts lately? Not accomplishing your life's goals? Fatter and balder than you wish you were? Don't worry, it's not your fault! You can blame everything that's wrong in your world on.... TELEVISION!

If you’ve been reading my newsletter and paying attention, you’ll remember I've told you before that everything you know (think you know) about marketingis wrong. This is an admonition by my good friend Rich Harshaw, down in Texas.

Let's start to clarify that statement a little bit... here’s YOUR problem - everything you know about marketing does not allow you to effectively, accurately and succinctly explain your company’s inside reality to the marketplace, where your prospects can learn about it. This tragically is a product of years and decades of conditioning to do marketing the wrong way.

Let me take you by the hand on a quick guided tour of why we're in this situation. I think you'll have a better appreciation for the specifics of the problem, where it came from, why it still exists, and begin to understand your solution for it.

In the early days of advertising--the late 1800's and early 1900's--most companies could only compete on a very local or regional basis.  This made the competitive situation a truly fierce battle. Much of the advertising was comparative in nature. They wouldn't just say, "Hey, we're better." They'd say, "We're better, and here's exactly why...based on this, this, this, this, and this." On average they did a pretty good jobbuilding a case and helping prospective buyers understand the important issues in regard to their particular product or service.  It was absolutely necessary to build that case in order to compete.

This all helped to facilitate the prospective buyer’s decision making process.  And this is what your marketing should do anyway. In other words, the ads performed a sales function. This highly competitive environment forced advertisers to use their brains when writing ads, and the beneficiary was the buyer. Back in those days, ads were thought of as an "army of tiny sales people all armed with the perfect sales presentation." The result was that the outside perception was generally a pretty good reflection of a company's inside reality.

All this helped, for the most part, clear up through the end of World War II. Then, everything changed. At that time, Americans had unprecedented prosperity, free time, and discretionary income. For the first time in the history of the world, the average citizen of our country said, "Hey, I'm in good shape, doing pretty well. I've got some time, I've got some money, and I'm ready to CONSUME!"

Then the most significant event in the history of marketing and advertising occurred. In 1945 television was first commercially introduced ....and it changed everything. At the time, there were less than seven thousand TV sets receiving signals from just nine stations in five markets. From there, it mushroomed. By 1951, less than six years later, there were twelve million sets. One year after that, in 1952, there were twenty million sets. 

Here's how that changed advertising...I'm talking about all advertising. Even if your company doesn't use television advertising, what you're about to learn has directly impacted you... and that impact has been very, very negative In the 1950's, the typical family in Americahad one TV set that received just 3 channels... and everybody in the family sat around and watched it practically every night. Television was very influential. Some of the biggest companies in the country noticed this and said, "Hey, here's a way that we can reach everybody in the whole dad-gum, cotton-pickin’, frickin’ country with an advertising message, and we can do it pretty cheap."

Up until then, the distribution of an advertising message, on a national basis, was extremely limited. Print advertising in a few magazines or in the Sears catalog was just about the only option. Now these advertisers could buy a TV commercial and reach just about every living person in the country, while they were sitting around watching the boob tube, and it cost a measly four thousand dollars a minute. What a bargain, even in 1950's money! As more and more companies began to catch on to this bargain, the competition for the advertising time got more intense and the TV stations prices for commercial time went through the roof. Local and regional competitors (this is probably you) quickly lost their ability to buy airtime. Soon only the largest national companies could afford the huge advertising rates, but because they were so big and already had national distribution for their products...and because of the almost instantaneous effectiveness of those advertisements, they gladly paid the money. For the BIG companies selling stuff to the TV watching public the marketing investment ROI was spectacular.

Air time is finite and as the demand exceeded supply, advertising prices went up. In an effort to maximize the ROI on the advertising investment, the length of the average TV commercial shrank. Instead of one or two minutes per commercial (very earlier on some commercials were 5 and 10 minutes long), the networks started selling them in 30 second blocks. Now here comes the key point:This meant that advertisers had less time to sell, less time to make a logical case for buying their product, less time to educate prospective consumers, less time to tell why they were different, or better, or unique. 

So what did they do instead, they started using slogans.Slogans were substituted because it was getting harder, impossible even, for the perception of the outside marketplace to accurately reflect the value or the inside reality of the company and its products.

At its very most basic level, what is marketing supposed to do?It seems easy once you think about it, first, marketing has to get the prospect's attention. What these big companies learned was that, even with only 30 seconds to work with, getting people’s attention was still not a problem. But what they couldn’t figure out was, then what? Marketing's next job after the interruption is to facilitate the prospect's decision-making process by providing information and evidence that molded the prospect’s perspective and made them feel like they would have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone else, but that company... regardless of price.

Companies and their ad agencies found that this was a lot harder to do with only 30 seconds. But they also found out that they didn't really need to do that. Why not, you ask, because the number of real competitors--that is, the number of competitors that could actually afford to be on the tube, advertising alongside them--was amazingly, very few. The cost was a very effective barrier.

They found out that with television, because of the limited number of players, they could just spend money and win by default. Not by better products, not by having a better inside reality. Not by better advertising.  They discovered they could win by being the only one who consistently got in front of the consumer. It's like winning in sports by forfeit--if the other team doesn't show up, you automatically win! If there happened to be two or three major competitors--say like Pepsi and Coke--that was fine because there was plenty of business to divide two or three ways. The bottom line is that because of the circumstances, a company's inside reality and outside perception didn't need to match up; the lack of a substantial number of choices eliminated this necessity.

Can you see where this is heading, and how it affects you?

Because of the escalating cost of TV time there was a reduced amount of time available. Because of the limited number of competitors, all of the focus shifted to  simply getting the attention of the prospect.  Advertising quickly abandoned selling and developed an appetite for creativity. The idea was to get into the consumer's brain with something creative that would stimulate them and cause them to recall the product later on when they needed it. Like I said earlier, that's when slogans began to rule the roost.

“Aren't you glad you use dial?”

“Ring around the collar.”

“Melts in your mouth -  not in your hands.”

How about this one: “Don't squeeze the........ that's right, Charmin.”

How do you know that? That commercial hasn't run in almost twenty years! The creative approach took over and soon began to filter throughout all other advertising media, including radio, newspaper, magazines, billboards, yellow pages, you name it. Once the creative message was in place, these big companies opened up the checkbook, spent the big bucks, and basically gave people no option but to remember the message. After 6,722 times of hearing "Plop plop, fizz, fizz," …you're going to remember it whether you want to or not! We call this using the "C&R" Formula—“C” for creativity and “R” for repetition. Make something unusual or weird, spend a zillion dollars, and haul your dough to the bank.

So how does this work now, in today's marketplace? Not as well as most big advertisers would like . It does still depend, to a certain extent, on how much money you have to spend. But to see it's true effectiveness, let me give you some slogans of companies now, and you tell me if you can name a) what company the slogans are for, b) what they do, and c) what you think their inside reality is. I'm betting you won't get more than zero or one. Okay, here goes:

The Power To Know

At your side

Instruments for professionals

Now you're really flying

Everywhere you go

These are all slogans that were pulled out of a current major business magazine, for major companies, with major products or services. Somebody spent a lot of money on ad campaigns and these slogans, in order to raise "awareness."  I'll be amazed if you can name even two of the companies using these solgans. "Now you're really flying?" Come on, can you tell what the name of that company is? Do you have a clue as to the inside reality of that company? No way.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't have a slogan. But I am saying that if it's all you're relying on, you're in for trouble. Even if you do spend enough money to garner widespread awareness, there's still no guarantee that people will know what the heck your inside reality is and feel compelled to buy something from you. There's a big gap between what the ad agencies like to call "awareness" and what we like to call "selling something."

Bottom line: You need to be cognizant that your ideas about advertising have been shaped by all the commercials you've seen from huge companies over the last 25 to 50 years. All is not lost, however.

We can still recover.

The answer is Exselleration’s MYM System.

Tagline ANSWERS:

"Everywhere you go" - Duane Reade Drugstores (NYC)

"Now you're really flying" - Cathay Pacific Airlines 

"Instruments for professionals" - Brietling (watches)

"At your side" - Brother Printers

"The Power To Know" - SAS (a software company)